Financial Times
September 7, 2011
Greece’s finance minister has said he will implement job cuts immediately in the country’s bloated public sector after international lenders turned up the heat on the socialist government.
Evangelos Venizelos told parliament on Tuesday night: ”The message is that we’re raising the flag of structural change ... Public sector reform is going to happen right now.
“The country has to gain momentum and a sense of purpose in order to become competitive, to have a future.”
Mr Venizelos’s policy switch followed warnings by Greece’s international lenders that foot-dragging on structural reform would no longer be tolerated. Athens is already lagging behind on this year’s fiscal targets and pressure is mounting on eurozone nations to address its debt crisis.
The government pledged to cut 150,000 public sector jobs, almost 20 per cent of the total, by 2014 under the terms of a second international bail-out agreed in July.
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